Leadership Shawano County Steps into Hospital

Posted 16 April 2014 1:14 PM by TCAuthor3

By Carol Ryczek, manager, community relations, Shawano Medical Center

Four hundred and fifty three.

If you need to get a copy of your medical record from Shawano Medical Center, you’ll need to take 453 steps from the Main Entrance to the door of our medical records (Health Information Management) department. If you are participating in a wellness challenge and want to increase your steps per day – that’s great! If you have to use a walker, you probably won’t be saying “great” at the end of your trip.

That’s what members of the Leadership Shawano County 2014 class discovered during their health care and wellness education day last week. Leadership Shawano County is an annual program that brings community leaders together with businesses and services throughout the county. While visiting Shawano Medical Center, they got a first-hand look at why this beautiful old building is not going to work for health care in the decades to come.

Three different groups took excursions through the building. They found that it takes 290 steps to go from the Emergency Department to the CT scanner and 460 to go from our Family Birth Center to surgery. In the group that ventured to medical records, one participant used a walker. (They were the last group to finish.)

Along the way, they discovered things they would like to see brought along to the new building (piano, natural materials and colors, warm smiles, artwork, fish tank) and things they would not mind left behind (confusing signs, jargon, drab colors, narrow halls, long distances between departments.)

Shawano Medical Center President/CEO Dorothy Erdmann agreed. These are some of the reasons, she explained, that the new ThedaCare Medical Center-Shawano is now under construction.

“Health care is changing and we have to design for the future,” she said. “The new ThedaCare Medical Center will have separate hallways for patients and services that are located nearby for patient safety. When a mom needs emergency surgery and seconds count, she will be just a few feet away from the surgical suite, not a football field away,” she told the group.

What did all three groups want to see in the new ThedaCare Medical Center-Shawano? Privacy; bright, cheerful décor; and ease of getting around. And that, Dorothy assured them, is what they will get.